Hive-mind solves tasks using Google Glass ant game

GOOGLE Glass could soon be used for more than just snapping pics of your lunchtime sandwich. A new game will connect Glass wearers to a virtual ant colony vying for prizes by solving real-world problems that vex traditional crowdsourcing efforts.

“Players of Swarm! connect to a virtual ant colony, vying for prizes by solving physical problems”

Crowdsourcing is most famous for collaborative projects like Wikipedia and “games with a purpose” like FoldIt, which turns the calculations involved in protein folding into an online game. All require users to log in to a specific website on their PC.

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Now Daniel Estrada of the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and Jonathan Lawhead of Columbia University in New York are seeking to bring crowdsourcing to Google’s wearable computer, Glass.

The pair have designed a game called Swarm! that puts a Glass wearer in the role of an ant in a colony. Similar to the pheromone trails laid down by ants, players leave virtual trails on a map as they move about. These behave like real ant trails, fading away with time unless reinforced by other people travelling the same route. Such augmented reality games already exist – Google’s Ingress, for one – but in Swarm! the tasks have real-world applications.

Swarm! players seek out virtual resources to benefit their colony, such as food, and must avoid crossing the trails of other colony members. They can also monopolise a resource pool by taking photos of its real-world location.

To gain further resources for their colony, players can carry out real-world tasks. For example, if the developers wanted to create a map of the locations of every power outlet in an airport, they could reward players with virtual food for every photo of a socket they took. The photos and location data recorded by Glass could then be used to generate a map that anyone could use. Such problems can only be solved by people out in the physical world, yet the economic incentives aren’t strong enough for, say, the airport owner to provide such a map.

Estrada and Lawhead hope that by turning tasks such as these into games, Swarm! will capture the group intelligence ant colonies exhibit when they find the most efficient paths between food sources and the home nest.

Lawhead envisions a number of other applications for the game, such as mapping hiking trails in a park so that the park ranger could see areas that need maintenance. At a larger scale, he says, game data could help city planners optimise a transport system by having fine-grained data about where and when people tend to travel.

These ideas are possible with regular location-aware mobile devices, but Lawhead and Estrada think that devices like Glass make them more feasible. “It gets the technology out of our pockets and into the world,” says Lawhead.

Niki Kittur at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says that projects like Swarm! could help solve physical world problems because they can tap into what a person is seeing. For example, a listing service like Yelp! might need to verify the address of a business. “A player who goes there might just glance at the storefront and the system could use machine vision to check it against their GPS data to verify the listing,” Kittur says.

Estrada and Lawhead are raising funds to build a working prototype of Swarm! by the end of the year.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Power from the people”